The WinterArts organizing committee is excited to announce ShakespeareFest, a community-wide celebration of arts, culture and all things Shakespeare, beginning January 23 with events throughout the month of February.

During the festival, artists are invited to create and present work inspired by the festival’s theme and to celebrate each other and the Fargo Moorhead community. Participating artists and organizations this year include the Fargo Moorhead Symphony, Theatre B, the Fargo Public Library, the Fargo Moorhead Community Theatre, four local breweries, NDSU’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and many more.

ShakespeareFest is the second in what is hoped to be an annual winter arts experience, with a different artist featured every year. “It’s so exciting to see how many artists and organizations are participating in the festival this year” said Carrie Wintersteen of Theatre B. “The number of events has more than doubled since our inaugural WinterArts festival in 2015, BeethovenFest. I didn’t know we had a chapter of the American Organists’ Guild until they asked if they could perform a Shakespeare-inspired Valentine’s Day concert in one of the community’s beautiful cathedrals.”

ShakespeareFest strives to foster a community-wide spirit of creating, exploring, and learning together through the arts. Participating arts and civic organizations aim to build a better community through shared artistic and cultural experiences. Much more than an arts event, ShakespeareFest turns the perceived injustice of our long, dark winter into a point of pride and participation for the whole community.

“It’s a unique opportunity for artists to engage with each other in the spirit of collaboration and to challenge each other artistically. By bringing artists together to work on a common theme, we can create something truly unique for our community.”

History: The origin of this idea began when Theatre B approached the Fargo Moorhead Symphony with a play by Moises Kaufman called 33 Variations, wondering if there might be some way the two organizations could collaborate around a Beethoven theme. This initial conversation led to the notion of a community-wide festival of all things Beethoven that would occur in February, with the Symphony presenting an “all Beethoven” concert and Theatre B performing the play about the composer. They invited other organizations to propose Beethoven-themed activities, and as more participants emerged, the WinterArts Festival was formed. WinterArts is now transforming the dead of winter into a fun, multi-faceted cultural event that offers multiple entry points for members of our community of all ages and interests.